Until the End of the World (Book 3): All the Stars in the Sky

by Sarah Lyons Fleming

  “Maybe you should ride up front first.”

  The kids, Kyle and Adam will ride in the truck’s cab while the rest of us switch between the bed and cab. We’re down to twenty-some hours to reach our intersection point. Mileage-wise, it’s four hours of driving, but we know how little that means. It’s evening by the time we leave. Peter drives and I cram in with Kyle, Penny, the kids and Jamie, while Ash shares Adam’s front seat at his insistence.

  “You don’t need to take a turn in the back,” I say to Penny, as James has said repeatedly in the past hour.

  “I’m hot and pregnant. I’ll be fine. Stop talking about it or I’ll kick you.”

  “Geez. Sorry for caring about the welfare of your unborn child and stuff.”

  Penny laughs and wrinkles her nose. “You guys stink.”

  Peter runs a hand through his crunchy hair while he sighs for the millionth time. Dried mouthwash acts like hair gel, we’ve recently found, but I don’t care that I’m sticky and crispy. We’d probably be feeling sick by now if we were infected, so I’m going to pretend that mouthwash saved the day.

  The road starts out paved but quickly turns to dirt. Hank is on my lap and there’s not a centimeter in which to shift with the bags under my feet, but when I look out the back window at Nelly and the rest bundled in blankets and squished among our supplies, I’m okay with the lack of space.

  Hank rests his head on my shoulder and murmurs, “I think you smell good. I wish we had gum.”

  For all his maturity, he’s also a little kid who longs for gum, and I want so desperately to shield him from the hurt so he can stay that way. I hold him close and wake up when the truck stops at what could be the same road and trees of an hour ago. Hank is so used to sleeping in strange places that he remains in a seated position with his head hanging when I slide out from under him.

  “I’ll be in the back,” I say to Bits, who nods sleepily.

  They’ve cleared out a space by tying things down and stacking bins. I climb into the truck’s bed with the others and James, who refuses to take his turn in the cab without Penny. “Besides,” he says, “Nelly and Kyle are big dudes. Margaret’ll be squashed enough.”

  “I like it out here,” Mark says, which only solidifies my belief that he’s off his rocker in some harmless way.

  At first I think it won’t be so bad—I’ll fall asleep wrapped in my blanket and ride out the cold. It starts slowly, like when you think a breeze is a bit chilly, and then builds until I’m not sure I’m still wearing my gloves and wool socks. The leather pants are better than wet jeans, but now that my sweater is soaked, all I have is the hoodie and my leather coat. I brought a wooden box and baby dress and earrings instead of an extra pair of jeans, but I still don’t regret it, even an hour into the ride when my limbs have frozen into the fetal position. An hour after that, when I’m about to die of full-body frostbite, the pickup slows.

  Nelly steps out. “We’ve got a tree up ahead.”

  A tree over two feet in diameter stretches across the road. James asks Nelly for our mileage so far and shivers over the atlas with his flashlight. “Nope, there’s no other way around this now. We’re in the home stretch.”

  The tree sits ten feet into the woods on either side, and the only way past is to cut through in two spots and roll out a section wide enough for the truck. Zeke starts on one end with my tomahawk and Nelly on the other with our one axe. Hitting a tree repeatedly is not a quiet activity, and it’s only a few minutes before the first Lexer shows up. Jamie runs it through and we lean on the truck to wait for more while the axes pound. Penny stands with us, long knife in hand. We’re not going to let her kill anything, but it appears she was serious about helping out.

  “Ow,” she says. “Nice kick, baby.”

  “What’s she doing in there?” I ask. “That must feel so weird.”

  “How about when they kick your bladder?” Jamie asks. “I can’t tell you how many times I almost peed my—”

  She stops, and it all clicks into place in the stunned silence that follows. Why Jamie has said she wouldn’t have kids until this was over, never talks about her life before, and how last year could have possibly been worse than losing her husband.

  “Oh, Jamie, I’m so sorry,” I say. Penny says something equally as lame.

  “She was five, going to start kindergarten in the fall,” Jamie says in a tight voice. I put an arm around her and find her shoulders even tighter. “She was with my mom while I worked late. I made it home before they closed off the city, but when Shawn and I got there they were already gone. I didn’t want to tell anyone. Shawn agreed not to. Because I didn’t want this—this fucking silence. I really am happy for you, Pen. Don’t treat me weird now, please.”

  Penny sniffs. “I promise I won’t. What was her name?”

  “Holly, after my grandma. She had big brown eyes like Nicki’s.”

  I can only imagine losing Bits for a split second before I’m engulfed in despair and on the verge of tears. I wonder if when you lose a child you almost wish they’d never been born so as to have avoided the devastation. Not that you’d really wish it, but almost. I don’t ever want to find out for sure.

  I walk forward to stab another Lexer coming up the road. These monsters have taken so much from us—little girls with big brown eyes, brothers who could climb mountains, lovers who appreciated the little things about us. They left parents childless and children parentless. After the Lexer falls, I want to kick it. I want to beat the shit out of it until it’s nothing but a wet pile of bones and flesh. But it would be pointless; they have no idea what they’ve done. We might have been punished, but so were they.

  I walk back. I can’t see Jamie’s face, but her voice is even. “…two hours of pushing. I had the hugest hemorrhoid after. Shawn called it The Other Baby. He’d pinch my butt and say, ‘How’s it hanging?’ ”

  I can’t help it when I giggle. I miss Shawn’s obnoxious but good-natured comments. The two of them join in, Jamie’s laugh the loudest.

  “I wanted to tell you both, but it got harder the more time passed,” Jamie says. “It started to feel like a dream. Then when you got pregnant I thought you’d be afraid to talk about it in front of me.”

  “No,” Penny says. “Believe me, any tips you want to share, I want to hear.”

  “I will,” Jamie says.

  “Good. All I’ve got is Cassie, and she doesn’t know shit about this.”

  “Hey!” I say. “I read those books you gave me. Birth is going to be orgasmic and wonderful. You’ll be a lotus flower opening to the sun or a river flowing to the mouth of the sea or something.”

  “I read those books,” Jamie says with a snort. “It’s amazing, but the only flower I felt like was one that was having its petals torn off.”

  “Oh, God,” Penny says, and rests her head on the truck.

  “It won’t seem so bad once it’s over. And I’m sure it won’t be as long as mine. Don’t worry.”

  This is why we need a Safe Zone. I’m sure we could figure out childbirth if all goes as it’s supposed to, but Jamie heard Doc talk of a midwife in Talkeetna, and we know for sure there’s a medic. We need to be safe in the spring, when the Lexers thaw and the baby cries.

  Peter comes bearing hot beverages and then leaves to relieve Nelly. Jamie takes a sip of her coffee and says, “He remembered how I like it. He’s awesome.”

  “He is. I have to pee again,” Penny says, and takes James into the dark with her.

  “The girls are going to be all over Peter in Alaska,” Jamie says.

  My stomach flops. I don’t want someone new who might disrupt our little family, who won’t love the kids the way we do, and I know it’s completely selfish of me to feel that way. I’m still searching for an appropriate reply when Jamie says, “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For being…I don’t know, a good friend.”

  “I love you, dummy,” I say. “You can always talk to me.”

  �
�I don’t want to pretend she didn’t exist anymore. I’ve wanted to ask you for a favor for a while. I only have one picture of her and it’s getting all crumpled…”

  “Of course I’ll paint her. And when my phone is fixed we’ll take a picture of the picture.” My fingers itch to get started. I don’t want her to lose the only memento she has of Holly. I’ll look at it in the light tomorrow so I can try to commit it to memory in case it’s lost.

  “Thanks.” Jamie takes a deep breath and holds it before exhaling.

  It’s quiet until Zeke hoots in triumph. “All right, let’s give it a go.”

  With the truck pulling and us pushing, the giant log rolls. The kids have slept through the entire experience and continue to sleep when we move on, although I’m wide awake. We’re almost at the Alaska Highway and what we find will determine our fate.

  CHAPTER 41

  What we find is nothing but open road bathed in early morning light. It’s only when we’ve gone twenty miles north—another day’s walk for the Lexers—that we stop to switch places and eat, although I consume my wafflecake with much less enthusiasm than previously.

  “I thought you’d never get tired of wafflecakes,” Peter says, and chases his last bite with water.

  “I need savory. This has been too much syrup in too little time.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Spanakopita.”

  “What’s that?” Bits asks.

  “Like a spinach pie with cheese and onions,” Peter says. “It’s good, if sort of random.”

  “In five seconds it’ll be something else,” I say. There’s a revolving carousel of food running through my mind every second of the day.

  “How about now?” Peter asks.

  “Everything bagel with cream cheese and tomato.”

  Bits grins. “Now?”

  “Salami on Italian bread with oil and vinegar and banana peppers.”

  “Now?” Hank asks.

  “Steak. I could do this all day, you know.”

  Bits and Hank play the game while I help to put away sticky dishes. There’s only enough water to drink, not wash. I sit in the truck bed and hope that the coming sun means a warmer ride than last night.

  ***

  It doesn’t. Maybe we’re at a higher altitude or winter is one day closer, but whatever it is, my jaw aches from chattering teeth. Peter pokes his head into my blanket burrow. “Come sit with me.”

  My hair whips out of my buns when I climb between his knees. I put my blanket over my head and lean into his warmth. I’m in no danger of overheating, but it’s better. His stubble scratches my neck when he leans in to say, “How can you see the beautiful scenery with a blanket on your head?”

  “You’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen ‘em all.”

  He must laugh because there are a few warm gusts of air on my ear. “I’ll tell you about it. The clouds are huge and the sky is the same color as Bits’s eyes. The trees are all evergreens, with the road the only thing to break them up. It looks like a painting. You’d be able to do it justice.”

  It’s tempting, but I keep my head covered and say, “Pretty.”

  I’ve been lulled into a place somewhere between waking and sleeping when he says, “You have to look now.”

  I peek out. The mountains are close enough to see the variations in browns that make up their craggy peaks. I find Peter’s hand under the blanket and squeeze rather than ruin the moment by shouting something that won’t match my level of happiness at the sight of salvation.

  “Okay, you can hide again,” he says, but I wait until trees have blocked the view.

  ***

  Zeke coasts to the side of the road at a crystal blue lake. “Water fill up.”

  I pick my way through sparse fir trees to the turquoise water. Bits dips her hands in the water and pulls back. “It’s freezing!”

  “Want to go for a swim?” I ask. “I’ll toss you in.”

  “No way!” she says and sneezes. She wipes her nose with her sleeve.

  I hand her a handkerchief. “Yuck, booger arm. Hey, I just remembered another joke.” She and Hank look up expectantly. “How do you make a tissue dance? Put a little boogie in it.”

  Bits groans and coughs into the handkerchief. I don’t like the deep, ragged sound and press my lips to her forehead even though she says she feels fine. Her cheeks are a deep pink, but she has no fever. I drop the water filter tube into the lake and pump to fill a container.

  Bits looks to the clouds tinged gold with afternoon light. “I miss looking at the stars.”

  “I do, too, but once we’re in Alaska we’ll watch all the time. And we’ll probably see the Northern Lights.”

  “I really want to see them. They sound so cool.”

  “I saw them once, when I was a little older than you.”

  Peter crouches by the water’s edge and fills a container to be treated later. “You did?”

  “One summer, way up at the top of New York State,” I say. “We were camping on a lake. They were kind of like yellow-green clouds made of light.” We’d stood on the shore, my father’s arm around my shoulders, until the magical colors had faded away.

  “Dan told me all about them,” Bits says.

  I concentrate on pumping the filter. “Yeah?”

  “What’d he say?” Peter asks when I don’t ask any more.

  “That you’d be granted any wish in the world the first time you saw them because they were made of fairy dust. Did you make a wish, Cassie?”

  “No, I didn’t know I should.” I smile; Dan would’ve told Bits something silly like that while wearing an absolutely serious expression.

  “I think you still can, even if it’s not the first time you’ve seen them. Since you didn’t make one before. I mean, it’s not like you knew.”

  “Dan was kidding,” Hank says, and pushes his glasses up the way he does before a lecture. “They’re particles from the sun hitting the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s the simple version, anyway. The Earth’s magnetic field—”

  “He told me that, too,” Bits says. “But it’s fun to pretend.”

  Hank thinks about it and then nods when he’s decided pretending is an acceptable activity. Sometimes he’s just too darn serious.

  “You can see them all the time in the winter, apparently,” Peter says. “We’ll have our wishes soon enough.”

  Hank looks down the road we have left to travel. “I wish we had them now.”

  “Me, too,” I say.

  CHAPTER 42

  It may be foolish to stop with less than a day of driving to reach Whitehorse, but Adam’s shoulder weeps blood and Kyle has puked four times from carsickness. We also don’t want to show up at Whitehorse in the dark with no idea of what will be there to greet us, or run into a pod on the road, although we haven’t seen a zombie for hours. We’ve seen animals, though—moose, elk and what looked like a bear before it lumbered off the road—and hitting one of them at night could destroy the truck and kill anyone not buckled in.

  We pass on staying the night in a small cabin full of dried blood and body parts. Now that we’re in the mountains, I can’t stop staring at the golden grasses, low red bushes and white trunks of what look to be birch trees, their leaves as bright a yellow as I’ve ever seen. I thought I was surrounded by mountains at Kingdom Come, but these tall, rocky peaks are the real deal.

  A sign advertises a hot springs ahead and another promises hotel rooms. I look longingly down the road that leads past a ranger station to the hot springs; to be warm and clean would be indescribably wonderful. Just past the springs is a lodge-type hotel with a few cars in a gravel lot out front. My legs are creaky from sitting in a truck for twenty hours, and between that and my pants I walk like a malfunctioning robot.

  “What is wrong with you?” Nelly asks.

  I don’t want to bitch about Ana’s pants in front of Peter, so I shrug and then freeze at footsteps from the side of the building. It’s a lot of crunching, maybe a pod. We edge toward
the pickup just as five large animals with shaggy brown beards, humped shoulders and thick fur covering their forelegs round the corner. They stop but don’t look half as shocked as we.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Zeke says. “Bison.”

  They look us over briefly and head for the opposite corner of the lot to poke around in the grass. Usually animals fear Lexers, possibly because of the smell, and their calm is a good sign. Barnaby watches them with round eyes from the truck but doesn’t make so much as a whimper. He knows when something’s out of his league.

  “Let’s go in,” Nelly says.

  “You said you were shooting the next animal you saw,” I say. “And there they are, ripe for the taking.”

  “We’ll be in Whitehorse tomorrow. What would we do with five hundred pounds of meat?”

  “Eat it? Bring the rest as a present?”

  He shakes his head as we step into a lobby that smells of mildew and decay, but it’s an old decay that’s barely there. The place looks like it could have used a major renovation before zombies, with the battered tables in the restaurant and fuzz-covered upholstery on the lobby furniture. Pots are scattered willy-nilly in the kitchen, some with dried food crusted to their sides. The upstairs guest rooms are empty as well.

  Zeke pats the woodstove in the lobby and says, “We’ll sleep down here. Let’s get everyone inside and bring down mattresses.”

  I help bring in wood from the pile outside for Peter to start a fire. Nelly sits in a chair with a brochure about the hot springs, driving me bonkers with talk of deliciously hot water and boreal forests. Once the fire’s roaring, Nelly asks, “How about we take a dip?”

  “We probably shouldn’t,” I say. We’ve spent the past year trying not to do anything too dumb, and I don’t want to start now.

  “We could drive over,” Peter says. I look at the floor to keep from laughing when his hand goes to his hair.

  “It should be safe enough,” Mark says.

  “I’ve never been,” Margaret says, eyes aglow. “I say we go.” Heads nod all around.

  “Please, please, please,” Bits says. She folds her hands under her chin. “Please? We never get to swim. I’ll do anything you want forever.”